What is a Weblog?

Please note: I am not the author.

The Author is Anthony V Parcero Jul 11, 04

According to Dave Winer, author of what many consider one of the first successful weblogs on the Internet (Scripting News), a weblog — or "blog" — can be characterized as a Web site which:
"points to articles elsewhere on the Web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A Weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc." (Dave Winer, The History of Weblogs)
Originally started by programmers and Web designers who worked full-time in the fledgling Internet industry of the mid-nineties, the first blogs showcased the research, coding, and organizational skills of their authors. Often hand-written and featuring short commentaries which linked users to other Web sites, these blogs were designed to help people filter out the increasing amount of detritus on the Web. Immersed in Web culture and possessing site-design skills, these early blogs became the center of ever-growing communities of fellow bloggers and their readership. The social interactions and connections associated with blogging differentiate it from other forms of content on the Web and the framework they established is still in use today.
At their heart, all blogs are based on the relationships formed by an author's use of regularly-updated, pithy commentary and elaborate cross-linking. Starting in 1991 with Tim Berners-Lee and the first Web site, the promise of the Internet was that anyone could have a voice through which they could communicate and connect (via hyperlinks) with others. By transforming the traditional roles of active writers and passive readers into one of participatory peers who can actively and freely express themselves, blogs provide a venue for open self-expression free from the crippling effects of our media-saturated culture.
No matter what their format or focus, all blogs organize their date- and time-stamped content in reverse chronological order so that the newest content appears most prominently on the Web site's home page. As new content is added to a site, older posts are archived to a static Web address (called a "permalink") which other blogs can precisely refer to and comment upon. Due to the fact that anyone with Internet-access can start a blog, it is the individuality of the commentary (and they're associated links) that distinguishes blogs from more traditional electronic clipping services and news media. Based on short, informal, and richly-hyperlinked content that is frequently updated, the blog "post" is free from the traditional, formal constraints of the printed-page. Thus, blog posts represent self-contained topical units which are characterized by a conversational (and sometimes controversial) tone that distinguishes them from more formal essays or articles.
Sometimes as short as one sentence or, more often, running for several paragraphs, the totality of the posts which make up a blog form an accurate representation of the personality of their author (or authors). Thanks to tools like Blogger, online journals and diaries are now the most dominant form of of blogs on the Internet. Due to the fact that many of these sites are tightly integrated into the daily lives of the author(s) and their audience, an online ecosystem called the blogosphere has emerged.
Thanks to constant improvements in the underlying technologies — along with the enormous proliferation of blogs following the launch of Blogger in 1999 — many Web sites and tools have sprung up to help authors create, maintain, search, and analyze various aspects of the Internet and the blogosphere. Using different metrics to analyzing the content of blogs, sites such as Technorati and Blogstreet focus on aggregating and tracking the popularity and influence of specific blogs. Through the use of full-text searches across posts, Blogpulse extends upon simple aggregation to provide users with the ability to track current trends, key people, and key phrases within the blogosphere. No longer passive recipients of information, individuals have embraced the freedom inherent in the framework, commonality, and organization of blogs in order to position themselves as key influencers at the center of a communications revolution many of us are still working to understand.


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